Note:
This essay features excerpts from Daniel Kremer’s forthcoming book Joan
Micklin Silver: From Hester Street to Hollywood.

Charles
arrives for Thanksgiving dinner at his vampy, neurotic mother Clara’s
house. In tow is his best friend, the “unemployed jacket salesman”
Sam. The kooky, usually bathtub-ridden Clara has somehow managed to emerge
all gussied up in a rather lavish party gown. Considering her psychosis,
everything seems too good to be true, but of course there is a catch: she has
neglected to prepare any of the food for the meal. Before they know it,
she’s revelling in the declaration “There isn’t any dinner!” As she erupts
in wild, manic laughter at her oversight, her two guests look on
incredulously. Charles, for one, is speechless.

“I
guess the joke’s on us,” Sam deduces. Indeed: “That’s right! The
joke’s on you!” (Incidentally, in my family, this scene is legendary, a
classic; the utterance of “There isn’t any dinner! The joke’s on you!”
incites at least a cockeyed smile.)

This
is an apt microcosm for Chilly Scenes
of Winter as a whole. The film, reduced to simplest terms, is
about people all dressed up with no place to go and nothing to do. No one
else is left to care that life has deceived them. They are left in the
cold, ostensibly ready for love, but unable to find it, fully receive it, or in
any way live with it. So, what is there to do except laugh to spite the
pain of a chilly reality?

Above
all, the film is about people who consistently set themselves up for
disappointment. Screenwriter and director Joan Micklin Silver observes,
“Everyone, at some time in their life, has loved someone more than that someone
has loved them.”

At
the center is the Sentimental Man, and this all sees its root in
literature. In the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel This Side of Paradise,
the woebegone Amory Blaine defines a sentimental person as someone who “thinks
things will last” and a romantic person as someone who “has a desperate
confidence that they won't.” Through the prism of that profundity, Chilly Scenes of Winter and a
significant number of Joan Micklin Silver’s films construct a tragicomic
reality, where two threads – the comedy of the romantic person, and the tragedy
of the sentimental person – are braided. Her skill as a director lies in
her uncommon mastery of tonal acrobatics. One can even trace a clear
trajectory that Silver’s films follow when applying Fitzgerald’s insight as a
navigational tool.

Silver
considers one of the other themes of Chilly
Scenes of Winter: “I can still see a funny thing in unrequited
love. And when things are very funny, I still see a sad thing in
them. I’ve always thought that that’s a little bit Jewish, a little bit
female, that there’s a kind of a point of view that sees the material a little
bit differently. When I wrote the script of ChillyScenes of
Winter, which went very easily, I had been thinking about it and just
knew exactly what I wanted to do.”

Silver
is certainly no stranger to Jewish content, having helmed Hester Street
(1975) and Crossing Delancey (1988), both of which are now rightly
considered classics of Jewish-American cinema. The sub rosa “Jewishness”
in Chilly Scenes ofWinter – though it lacks explicit Jewish characters – is woven into its
fabric in such a way as to be oddly pronounced. Charles’s sporadic
direct-to-camera addresses break the fourth wall at infrequent, uneven
intervals, playfully refining the style of Woody Allen’s asides in Annie
Hall (1977) two years prior. In Charles’s sardonic narration, he often
digresses in a manner that suggests the occasional whimsicality of Saul Bellow,
or Philip Roth (as in accounting his grandfather’s suicide after a hunting
expedition, or when he submits the story of Jacques Cousteau’s beloved dolphin
as a metaphor for his current condition). Although some of these
digressions are extracted verbatim from the text of Ann Beattie’s novel,
Silver’s structuring and delivery of them suggest an alternate sensibility that
departs from Beattie’s.

In
Silver’s world, the character Charles Richardson, though clearly a handsome
Gentile, is a nebbish, and specifically so as “nebbishness” stood as the
classic trait defining the Jewish film hero in the seventies (Woody Allen,
Elliott Gould, and Dustin Hoffman being the titans). Despite his moments
of charisma, humor, and gallantry, Charles’s sexual frustration and resulting
malaise (two more cinematic and literary Jewish traits) are rendered with
conflicting tones. When Andrew Sarris professed that Chilly Scenes of Winter was “a very funny film” all the more
so because “the laughs are all the richer for being tinged with sadness and
desperation,” and also when Kenneth Turan stated that “it will make you laugh
to keep from crying,” this is the very aspect they were suggesting.

Silver’s
humor cannot help but bespeak Jewish humor in general, in that Jewish humor is
of a disenfranchised people who have leaned on a world-weary wit from time
immemorial, to spite the hostile attitudes oh-so-traditionally directed their
way. Thus, finding unexpected laughs in personal misery is a centrally
Jewish conceit. The audience is expected to chuckle at the sight of
Charles parked outside an elementary school stalking Laura as she picks up her
stepdaughter Rebecca (like a common creeper), or when Charles puts Laura’s
“family” to bed in an A-frame dollhouse that replicates the house in which Laura
lives with her family.

Charles’s
pathological behavior, which would be treated as a serious, maybe even grave,
central predicament in the hands of another director, is given a full-bodied
comedic anchor in Silver’s hands. As comedy, the film is a daredevil
high-wire act. To the unattuned, perhaps the question of “Is this supposed
to be funny?” might persist. Silver leaves no question that she thinks it
is, and makes it so easy to follow her down the road she paves. After all,
it is not uncommon even for a rabbi to take a stab at humor at a funeral.

#####

Daniel
Kremer lives in San Francisco, California. He has written for Filmmaker Magazine and Keyframe, and is the author of the book Sidney
J. Furie: Life and Films (available through Patrick McGilligan’s Screen Classics Series). He is
currently writing a book about the life and films of Joan Micklin Silver, due
in 2018. Starring John Heard,
Mary Beth Hurt, Peter Riegert, Kenneth McMillan and Gloria Grahame, Chilly Scenes of Winter, featuring an Audio Commentary with
writer/director Silver and producer Ann Robinson, plus an Isolated Track of Ken
Lauber’s score that includes some unused music positioned as originally intended,
debuts on Twilight Time hi-def Blu-ray February 14. Preorders open February 1.